Your country’s faced war. The leader of your country, it appears from
all the overwhelming evidence you have, has ordered genocide and pursued other
campaigns that have been in flagrant disregard of all things human rights. A
special court is constituted to try your leader and it convicts him for
genocide. But before you can say genocide, the constitutional court of your
country annuls the trial and throws it back by many days to the effect that the
decision it passed does not hold good any longer.

Makes you angry, doesn’t it?

Well. That’s what people in Guatemala are going through right now. Why?
Well. Because of procedure.

Stretching over thirty years, the Guatemalan Civil War started in 1960, fought
between the government of Guatemala and several leftist rebel groups that were
supported by many ethnic Mayan indigenous people and economically disadvantaged
Ladino peasants, the war witnessed massive human rights violations. The
government of Guatemala has been oft condemned for having committed a crime of
Genocide, and of having committed widespread human rights violations against
the Mayan people. Statistics reveal that as many as 200,000 people died or went
missing during the war, including 40,000 to 50,000 people who were subjected to
enforced disappearances. The Mayan Ixil are people indigenous to Guatemala,
living in primarily three municipalities in the Cuchumatanes Mountains in the
northern part of the department El Quiché. The Ixil community wound up becoming
the principal target of a genocide operation that involved systematic rape,
displacement and imposed hunger during the course of the conflict.

Women were
“routinely raped in front of their children, often gang-raped, and others were
forced into slave labour – cooking, washing clothes and providing sexual
favours under duress – for the army or the civil patrol leaders.” In the Guatemalan Civil War, most of the sexual violence
took the form of Femicide. Over 5,000
women and girls in Guatemala
have been murdered in the past ten years, many of them raped and mutilated,
their bodies discarded in public places. In Guatemala, unlike in other
instances where the woman is left to bear the child that was conceived out of
rape, the women were brutally forced to abort their children since the use of
rape was in pursuit of genocide. In a bid to prevent
newborns among the indigenous groups
they would take pregnant women and beat their wombs until they would
involuntarily wind up aborting. (Genocide Watch, 2012) Sometimes, the wombs of pregnant
women were brutally cut open, the babies were taken out and then a stick was
put in the anus of the fetus that would come out of its mouth. (Genocide Watch,
2012) Invariably, and unsurprisingly, the mothers died after being cut open.

The President of Guatemala during the time of the Civil War, Efrain Rios Montt, was prosecuted for the commission of Genocide in Guatemala. A judge ruled that Efrain Rios Montt, the former general and Guatemalan head of state, would stand
trial for his alleged role in committing a crime of genocide. Jose Efrain Rios Montt, at 86, is among the
several ex-officers in Guatemala that are currently facing trial for the crimes
they committed during the civil war in the country that raged on for 36 years
before it ended in 1996. A year ago, he was arrested and kept under house
arrest under the orders of a judge. That itself signaled an epoch making
change in the country’s trajectory of grappling with impunity. Attempts were made
to have the charges dropped, but the country has still surged ahead with every
intention to try the leader. Thus far, no ranking officer has been held
responsible for the violence that killed nearly 200,000 people. Consequently,
for the nation, the trial is a significant milestone. A truth commission, over
a decade ago, determined the elements of violence during the civil war
constituted genocide – especially under Rios Montt’s rule where the
counter-insurgency campaign prevailed. Though there have been many efforts to
bring in changes in Guatemala’s courts, the people seeking change have been met
with treats and violence. Consequently, survivors reached out to courts abroad.

Although laudable, justice was trumped again. Rios Montt was allegedly denied his right to due process, and his trial was annulled and set back to a prior date. With the
annulment,the case goes back into the docket. It is
possible that there may be a retrial, it is possible that there may be a
conviction, and it is possible that there may not. But the fact of the matter
is that Rios Montt remains free. Not meaning to judge the case at all: but when
the evidence is overwhelming, why annul the trial? Wouldn’t it have been a
wiser thing to offer Montt a chance to appeal against his decision, instead of
nullifying it?